Whether or not an attack on Iraq is in the offing, the White House’s 2002 campaign theme was clear in Cheney’s first election-year swing through California last week: we are at war, and will be for the foreseeable future. And only he and his boss (backed by Republicans in Congress) have the Right Stuff–and a knowledge of the specs–to combat terrorism and protect the homeland.
Vice presidents are always the remote-controlled attack devices in political campaigns, and Cheney will be no exception. He’s penciled in for 60 campaign stops, President Bush for no more than 40. The role is traditional, but the man in it is not. If campaigning were the Olympics, Cheney would be curling: a polished heavyweight gliding slowly across an enclosed area.
And yet Cheney’s soporific style may make him the perfect delivery vehicle for what, in a louder mouth, would be an explosive subtext: if you’re against us, you’re endangering America. Cheney comes off as what he essentially is: a guy from the real war room, temporarily freed from his undisclosed location (before he heads off to the Middle East in March) to provide an update on the battle.
While he’s at it, he can throw elbows at Democrats, but in the dry, clinical tone of a position paper. The plague of terrorism is worse than it would have been, he told the country-club crowd, because the Clinton administration hadn’t been tough enough in responding to attacks throughout the ’90s. “There were questions about us and our staying power,” he said. Cheney cited a source for his assertion: an op-ed piece by Clinton nemesis Dick Morris.
Bush’s personal popularity, and the widespread support–here in America, at least–for his crusade against terrorism, help the White House paper over serious cultural divisions within the GOP. It’s no accident that Bush political consigliere Karl Rove sent Cheney first to California, where rifts over abortion, gun control and gay rights have ripped the GOP apart. At the fund-raiser for Rep. Richard Pombo, pro-choice women in power suits joined pro-life ranchers to bask in the aura of Bush-Cheney leadership.
The White House’s real strategic mission is to put California–a virtual Democratic lock in presidential politics– in play in 2004. Rove’s plan last fall was to win back the governorship by enticing former Los Angeles mayor Dick Riordan–a maverick liberal Republican–to run for the GOP nomination. But now Riordan (whose sins include praising Clinton as a great leader) is pinned down in a nasty race against a fast-rising conservative, Bill Simon Jr.
And the war effort isn’t an answer to Bush’s biggest potential pitfall in California: the economy. The day after the fund-raiser, Cheney spoke to an auditorium of high-tech executives in San Jose, where there is real, even deepening, dread about the direction of business. The crowd was buzzing about a meeting that Sen. Joe Lieberman had conducted in the valley the day before. He asked scores of executives to assess where their business was headed. Almost all gave a thumbs down.
Cheney was upbeat, in his solemn way. He got hearty applause when he pledged to oppose higher taxes and work for expanded free trade. But he got blank looks when he said that Bush’s new budget–with $100 billion in new Pentagon and homeland-defense spending–was a potential gold mine for Silicon Valley. “We’ve never really thought of ourselves as government contractors,” one executive said after Cheney had left. “We don’t want to now.” But someone will have to invent a successor to the Predator, and the vice president will want to be briefed.
